Search engines are software programs designed to search for electronic information based on user queries and to then return results of the search to the user. Today, web or internet search engines are widely used to search for information on the world wide web (the “Web”), FTP servers, or the internet. Several commonly used web search engines include Google™, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, and Yandex. Web search engines work by storing information on numerous web pages, which are then retrieved by a web crawler. The contents of each web page are analyzed, indexed and data relating to the web pages are stored in a database for later use. When a user enters a query in a web search engine using a browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or the like), the engine examines its index and returns a list of “relevant” web pages.
Examples exist of various web searching systems and methods. Systems and methods for searching and retrieving information are described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,395,222 and 7,617,193, and U.S. Published Application No. 2011/0022549. In general, these methods involve search engines which receive user queries, search for relevant articles based on the query, calculate a score for one or more parameters, rank and display the search results.
Many of the existing search and retrieval systems return search results at a document level rather than at a person level. A few existing systems find expertise at the people level based on “ask the experts” model or by mining published documents. These systems, however, do not provide the users with an option to either select the data sources or weigh or rank search parameters in real time. Users are accordingly required to search multiple data sources, conduct multiple searches, retrieve the several search results, and then compile and aggregate the various results in order to determine the most relevant or best results for the search parameters selected.
Accordingly, the need exists for a method for producing search results, and a system for implementing the method, based on user customizable search and ranking parameters.